Administrators of many types of servers, including web servers and database servers, have access to vast amounts of data specifying the requests that are received by the server. A captured database workload is one example of such data possessed by a database server. A captured database workload file records requests received by a particular database through an open connection during a particular interval of time. If there are multiple open connections to the database during capture, then the result may be multiple capture files, one file for each open connection. The requests received by the server are often automated and sent by a plurality of different application servers. Similarly, a captured application workload file records requests received by an application through an open connection during a particular interval of time.
Captured database workload files are described in greater detail in application Ser. No. 11/800,122, entitled Database Workload Capture And Replay Architecture, filed on May 3, 2007, the contents of which are incorporated by reference. Captured application workload files are described in greater detail in application Ser. No. 13/076,313, entitled Application Workload Capture And Replay System, filed on Mar. 30, 2011.
Server administrators and application administrators can benefit by learning about the types of requests the server receives and the consequences of those requests. Previous approaches have not used information about the requests received by a server to determine patterns that can provide insight about the received requests and the consequences of the received requests.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.